Old Mr. Flood Read Online Free Page B

as well as in the winter; she can’t seem to stop. She appears to be unusually corpulent, but she says that this is misleading. “I’m really a thin little thing, nothing but skin and bones,” she says, “but I got on twelve layers of clothes—thirteen, counting my shimmy. If you was to see me undressed you wouldn’t knowme.” One morning I was going through the market with Mr. Flood. We paused beside Mrs. Treppel’s fire and he said, “Birdy, tell the man how cold it gets in Peck Slip.” “Well, son, I tell you,” she said, hopping up and down as she talked, “if you went up to the North Pole in the dead of December and stripped to the drawers and picked out the biggest iceberg up there and dug a hole right down to the heart of it and crawled in that hole and put a handful of snow under each arm and sat on a block of ice and et a dish of ice cream, why, you wouldn’t be nowhere near as cold as you’d be in Peck Slip in a sheepskin coat with a box fire in the gutter.”
    Another fish-market notable with whom Mr. Flood occasionally takes a first-today drink is Mr. Ah Got Um, a high-spirited Savannah Negro who operates a retail fish store on Lenox Avenue in Harlem and who attends the market two mornings a week to do his buying. If he feels good, he chants as he walks through the stalls:
    Ah got pompanos!
Ah got buffaloes!
Ah got these!
Ah got those!
Ah got um!
Ah got um!
Ah’m the ah-got-um man!
    Around eleven o’clock, Mr. Flood shows up for lunch at Sloppy Louie’s. The last time I visited him, we had lunch together. He had decided on a blue-black sea bass that day, and while the chef was broiling it we sat at a table up front, talking. A young fishmonger in an Army uniform, on furlough and looking up his colleagues in the market, came in. Mr. Flood hadn’t seen him in a year or so. “Why, hello, Pop,” the soldier said. “Are
you
still alive?” Mr. Flood’s face fell. “Look here, son,” he said. “That’s a rather personal question.” He became gloomy and didn’t say anything for a while. When the chef brought his fish in, however, he started talking again. “You’re damned right I’m still alive,” he said, opening his fish and deftly removing its spine and fin bones. “Fact of the matter is, I feel the best I’ve felt in years. I et four dozen oysters last night and I felt so good I almost had an oyster fit.” He stared at me for a moment. “Did you ever see anybody have an oyster fit?” he asked.
    “No, sir,” I said.
    “My boy,” Mr. Flood said, “people who are unaccustomed to oysters sometimes behave real queer after putting away a few dozen. I’ve witnessed many seizures of this nature. I’ll tell you about one. My daughter Louise lives up in South Norwalk, Connecticut, and I visit her once a year, the first week in September, when the oysters come back in season. I’ve got a good friend in South Norwalk, Mr. Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company. Drew owns twenty-two thousand acres of oyster beds in the Sound and he produces the biggest oyster in the United States, the Robbins Island. Some get as big as omelettes. His main dock is located on the Norwalk River, and when I’m visiting my daughter I walk down there every day and Drew and I sit around and talk and eat oysters.
    “Well, back in September, 1934, during the depression, Drew and I were on the dock, talking, and up walked three fellows said they were from Brooklyn. They took off their hats and asked for deckhand jobs on one of Drew’s dredge boats. They were weevily fellows, pale, stoop-shouldered, and clerky-looking, three runts, no life in them at all. I don’t believe a one of them had cracked a smilein months. Drew took pity on them and hired them. And before they went out to bring in a load of oysters, he took the captain aside and told him to let those Brooklyn boys eat all the oysters they could hold as soon as the dredge got out on the beds. ‘Let them stuff themselves,’ Drew